Are VMware slowly becoming the new Oracle? That was the question being
asked after the backlash to their initial vRAM licensing model at the launch of
vSphere 5. With VMware’s somewhat quick retraction, it was ensured that any
unsavoury Larry Ellison comparisons were quickly put to bed. Despite this it
was still a signal of intent and an indication of VMware’s recognition of its
ever growing influence and clout. Now as VMware make serious manoeuvers into
the PaaS space, a VMware based Cloud monitoring solution is a must. So with
this in mind what is to be made of the huge marketing and push for their
customers to adopt their VM monitoring tool vCenter Operations 5.0?

Back when VMware was only considered ideal for virtualizing test and
development environments, the native alarms and performance graphs of the then
termed Virtual Center were more than adequate for general monitoring purposes.
As the vSphere revolution began with the average customer having VMs numbering
in the hundreds, VMware generously allowed a plethora of third-party
performance and capacity tools to plug into vCenter via their SDK. Suddenly
every subsequent VMworld trade show would get bigger not just by the number of
attendees but by the number of VM monitoring companies and tools such as
vKernel vOPS, Veeam Monitor, VMTurbo Operations Manager, Quest vFoglight and
Xanagti VI to name just a few. So when in February 2011 VMware eventually did
enter the monitoring space with the purchase of Integrien’s Alive and its later
relaunch and rebranding as vCenter Operations Manager, there wasn’t anything
majorly distinctive between what were already mature and in most cases cheaper
solutions. More than a year later, a huge marketing campaign and a revamped
version, vCenter Operations 5.0 is slowly gaining traction amongst end users as
the VM monitoring tool of choice but how much of this is related to its actual
capabilities as opposed to VMware driving an agenda to monopolise a market
segment that is clearly profitable?

To answer this, the first thing to do is to assess whether there is a
need for such a tool, whether it’s any good and what distinction, if any does
it bring from the competition? The truth is that anyone who has had to troubleshoot
a VMware environment, or gauge the capacity or performance, regardless of the
size of the infrastructure will testify that the default tools are simply not
sufficient. Add the factor that more and more business critical applications
are now virtualised with virtual environments growing at an immense rate, then
an enterprise-grade performance, capacity and monitoring tool is a necessity.

So looking at the vCenter Operations Manager vApp (from now on to be
referred as VCOPs) the first thing to note is that it collects data not only
from VMware‘s vCenter Server but also from vCenter Configuration Manager as
well as third-party data sources such as SNMP. This collected data is then
processed by the vCenter Operations Manager Analytics VM which presents the
results through the rather colourful looking GUI. Compared to its predecessor
the most notable change with the VCOPs 5.0 GUI is its integration with
vCenter’s navigation/inventory pane. This small yet effective change makes it
look much more like a VMware product as opposed to the bolt-on appearance that
both Integrien and previous VCOPs versions possessed.

Using the themes / badges of Health, Risk and Efficiency, the GUI
organises the view of an entire infrastructure onto a main dashboard that can
be drilled down to root causes and further details. Utilising a green, yellow,
red scheme where green means good and red is bad, the badges are a quick
indication of areas of concern or that require investigating. By seeing
something as red, a couple of clicks and simple drill down will show you the
relevant VMs and their affected hosts as well as any shared or affected
datastores. Furthermore each badge carries a score where a high number is good
for the Health and Efficiency badges but potentially detrimental for the Risk
badge as a low risk is optimum for your environment. All of this enables
quicker troubleshooting in large VM environments as issues can be quickly
pinpointed from a very high level view down to the granular detail in just
seconds.

The Health badge identifies current problems in the system and
highlights issues that require immediate resolution. Using a heatmap, the end
user has a quick health overview of all parent and child objects such as
virtual machines and hosts that can also be rewound by up to six hours to track
back trends. The Risk badge identifies exactly that and uses data based on
infrastructure stress, time and capacity remaining. It also identifies
potential issues that could impact the infrastructure’s performance and can also
be trended back to seven days worth of data. Finally the Efficiency Badge,
which takes advantage of the now integrated CapacityIQ tool, is used for
capacity planning where CPU, memory and disk space resource metrics are
referred to for identifying overprovisioned, under-utilised or optimally
resourced VMs.

A single dashboard can highlight issues from numerous objects such as datastores, clusters and VMs

As well as the Badges and their drill down details, VCOPs also has
several menu tabs such as Operations, Planning, Alerts, Analysis, and Reports.
Of most interest in the Operations tab is the Environmental section where a
visual representation of objects such as the associated vCenter Server,
datacenters, datastores, hosts, and virtual machines are presented alongside
their scores and relationship. This is an excellent feature that enables the
end user to quickly drill down, identify and investigate more granular objects
of concern and their health status. The Planning section also contains a very
useful summary section that provides a visual overview in graphs and tables of
capacity for any selected object enabling you to easily switch between deployed
and remaining capacity. Here VCOPs provides the ability to have extended
forecasts of remaining capacity for up to several months, an essential value
add especially as environments grow at such a radical pace.

In addition to the capacity planning and forecasting features, it’s
also good to see VCOPs incorporate what-if scenarios. Now becoming common
amongst several VM monitoring tools, what-if scenarios are a useful addition to
any VM environment especially as they allow you to foresee the impact on
capacity and workload on your virtual environment prior to making any actual
changes.

Finally the area in which VCOPs really stands out from the
competition, is its unique and new vCenter Infrastructure Navigator feature.
With the understanding that paramount to any business, monitoring solutions
that look at the performance of their applications as opposed to just their
infrastructure are far more attractive, VMware’s vCenter Infrastructure
Navigator has been introduced to automatically discover application services
and map their dependencies and relationships. One of the main benefits of
having a knowledge of the application and virtual infrastructure’s
interdependencies is that it will immediately help reduce MTTR by either
eliminating or implicating the infrastructure as a cause of application
slowdowns. Furthermore as key applications and their underlying infrastructure
are constantly identified and monitored the end user can quickly ensure that
the right level of resources are allocated and that priority is given to those
VMs that actually need it.

When you put this in the context of disaster recovery and more
specifically VMware’s latest version of Site Recovery Manager, end users
now have the opportunity to create recovery plans and protection groups
that are aligned to the applications that reside on their VCOPs monitored
VMs. This is a far cry from the competition whose equivalent Disaster
Recovery solutions still don’t allow you to automatically failback or even
failover multiple VMs simultaneously. Using VCOPs’ metrics and mapping of
application interdependencies with VMs and underlying hosts, the
level of sophistication in Disaster Recovery planning is raised
significantly in that it’s now related to what matters to the business most,
namely the apps.

So while this all sounds great does VCOPs really spell the end of
other VM monitoring solutions and a consequent reduction of third party stalls
and their scantily clad glamour models at VMworld? Does it really constitute a
comprehensive Cloud monitoring solution? At present, probably not. VCOPs is
still more expensive than most of its competitors with a per VM pricing model
and still has some limitations, most significantly its inability to monitor physical
servers in the same way it monitors VMs. It also has to gain a market share by
going against already popular and seasoned solutions that have already existent
end users and champions. In saying that, this is VCOPs 5 and is merely the
beginning.

Looking firstly at the price challenge, VCOPs is software and indeed
it would be foolhardy to not expect the pricing model to change and become more
attractive to new customers or even bundled in with new hypervisor
purchases. When looking at the bigger picture, VMware are clearly
focusing further up the stack with a PaaS offering and it would also be
short-sighted to think VMware only see VCOPs as a single entity product that
just monitors the infrastructure space. If anything it’s an investment to what
will be an integral component to a comprehensive Cloud monitoring package that
enables successful migrations to VMware’s PaaS offerings. In such a scenario it
would be ideal for VMware to have a PaaS offering that was already built on an
IaaS monitoring, management and orchestration solution that they themselves
have developed. Furthermore should the next version of VCOPs or the package
that it comes with include the ability to monitor analytics that incorporate
physical blades we could well have an integrated monitoring tool that’s
impossible to compete with. Just imagine being able to run a what if scenario
on a physical blade prior to virtualizing it onto a VM so that you’re able to
size up the resources accurately not based just on current metrics but also analysed
and predicted growth?

So taking a step back and looking at the whole VMware portfolio it
seems that the heavy investment and marketing of VCOPs is more a ploy of
eventually tying in many of their separate solutions as a single comprehensive
management, orchestration and Cloud monitoring package that is managed
singlehandedly via the vCenter interface. Currently VMware is littered with
lots of separate solutions that include vCloud Director and vCenter Chargeback
Manager but if they were fully integrated with VCOPs they would make a tasty
introduction package to those looking to deploy a Private Cloud. Then there’s
VMware’s Hyperic which has the ability to close the
aforementioned physical gap as it can monitor the physical environment
underlying vSphere hence providing performance management of
applications in both physical and virtual environments.
Therefore it’s not impossible even today for a Cloud infrastructure’s
components to be monitored with a bolted together Hyperic and VCOPs solution,
with Hyperic monitoring the applications and the processes running on vCloud
Director, which in turn is conveyed to VCOPs which is monitoring the VMs and
consequently other components such as vShield Manager.

Using VCOPs in conjunction with vCloud Director, vShield Manager & Hyperic may provide a Cloud monitoring solution but currently it's the sum of parts as opposed to a fully integrated and seamless stack

But for VMware to be
successful in the PaaS sphere they need to enter and engage with a market
segment they’ve had little exposure to i.e. the application owners. Looking at
VMware’s vFabric Application Performance Manager (driven by AppInsight) as part
of a fully integrated package of VCOPs, vCloud Director, Hyperic etc. could be
they key that opens the door to application owners. It would also provide
VMware a true Cloud monitoring solution that could provide real-time visibility
and control from application to infrastructure via a single management interface.

Integration with vFabric AppInsight could provide a comprehensive Cloud monitoring solution that looks from infrastructure all the way up to the application layer

Ultimately
this requires a lot of development work and effort from VMware and will
eventually bring them into competition with a new breed of vendors that
specialize in Cloud management and monitoring. The point is as good as VCOPs is
and as good as the competitors are it's important not to get blinkered and
avoid the bigger picture of what VCOPs may eventually become part of. Either
way VCOPs’ current competitors need to up their game quick or find alternative
features to their solutions – to survive in this game it’s clear, you’re either
big or niche.

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Disclaimer

The thoughts, comments, views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and not those of the company I work for. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the company I work for.